Human Tit Cenk Uygur Attacks The Daily Banter

When the Banter's Jeremy Fassler informed me this morning that Cenk Uygur had gone after us (again) on his show, I shuddered a little. Not because I was worried about The Young Turks blistering "take down" of our site, and not because of the rampaging 'TYT Army' waiting in the wings to go after us on Twitter. No, I shuddered because I knew I'd have to watch Cenk Uygur for more than 30 seconds in a row.

When the Banter's Jeremy Fassler informed me this morning that Cenk Uygur had gone after us (again) on his show, I shuddered a little. Not because I was worried about The Young Turks blistering "take down" of our site, and not because of the rampaging 'TYT Army' waiting in the wings to go after us on Twitter. No, I shuddered because I knew I'd have to watch Cenk Uygur for more than 30 seconds in a row.

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Our dearly departed Chez Pazienza used to call the TYT blowhard in chief "Cenk The Horrible" -- a reference to his intensely annoying personality that prevented Chez from ever taking him seriously. That Cenk has managed to attract a truly incredible amount of diehard fans (80 million Youtube followers, as he will remind you at every given opportunity) says more about the tastes of white millennial hipsters than it does Uygur's talent as a presenter. I dread to think what kind of person can tune in to watch the TYT chieftain bloviate about "The Establishment" and brag about his progressive purity on a daily basis.

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Either way, I sat down to watch Uygur's little rant about The Daily Banter (or 'The Daily Fluffer' as he imaginatively calls us) and literally had to stop a couple of minutes in and switch to the Youtube transcription to finish the segment. Uygur really is that irritating. Outraged that writers like Jeremy and BET's Brandi Amara Skyy are going after celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Rosario Dawson who supported Bernie Sanders and blamed them in part for Clinton's loss to Donald Trump, Uygur delivered a 15 minute diatribe full of laughably false statements that only the most devoted "TYT Army" fanatic could buy into. In it, he claimed Clinton was solely responsible for her loss to Donald Trump, not those who refused to vote for her during the election. To prove his point, Cenk hilariously used a TYT poll that showed 97.4% of the population believed Hillary Clinton was entirely to blame for losing the election, and 2.6% blamed Bernie Sanders -- all the while keeping a completely straight face (no bias in the TYT Army!).

Uygur also claimed that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump because a poll had him defeating Trump in the general (because of course all the polls about the 2016 election were so accurate).

Uygur spent several minutes attacking Fassler because of a piece he had written telling Susan Sarandon to save her tears for DREAMers about to be booted out of the country by Donald Trump. Defending Sarandon and other celebrity Bernie Sanders diehards, Uygur attempted to claim that Clinton wanted to kick out children who had entered the country illegally by selectively quoting and misrepresenting her words from an interview she did in 2014 on CNN. Clinton's record on DREAMers is stellar, and she campaigned on supporting them in both the primary and the general election. Uygur of course failed to mention any of this.

Susan Sarandon, it should be remembered, refused to vote for Hillary Clinton because, amongst other things, Clinton had shown "no support for legalizing marijuana". Yes, really. Sarandon's litany of complaints about Clinton helpfully posted right before the vote in November of 2016 were either wrong, inaccurate or deeply misleading. For example, Sarandon falsely accused Clinton of not supporting the labeling of GMOs. Not only did Clinton support the labeling of GMOs, she held views almost identical to those of Bernie Sanders. Sarandon also accused Clinton of not supporting a national $15 minimum wage, which of course, she had (although in a more nuanced way that was more politically feasible).

In reality, the number of Sanders supporters egged on by outlets like The Young Turks and celebrities like Susan Sarandon who either refused to vote for Clinton or switched to Donald Trump (a shocking 1 in 10 Sanders supporters actually voted for Trump) cost Hillary Clinton the election. That isn't based on a poll, but on the actual math. Yes, Clinton could have run a better campaign, and yes she wasn't the perfect candidate by any means (hence the reason I supported Sanders in the primary), but there were so many events conspiring against her you'd have to be willfully ignorant to deny them. Not only was Clinton battling 25 years of relentless Republican smears, she had the Russian government helping Trump and the head of the FBI who thought it wise to wrongly announce she was being investigated days before the vote. This doesn't include Cenk Uygur and the "TYT Army" who had themselves dedicated years to hounding centrist Democrats not inline with their strict definition of liberalism.

Personally, I don't spend much time thinking about Susan Sarandon or the "TYT Army" any more, but I understand why so many people are angry about their sabotaging of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election and their refusal to acknowledge the blindingly obvious fact that she would have been an infinitely better president than Donald Trump.

What I do take exception to is the lying Cenk Uygur engages in, firstly by misrepresenting the position of The Daily Banter, and secondly by blatantly misleading his viewers with bullshit statistics and ideological ranting that takes little more than a 30 second google search to dismiss. For the record (again), I supported Bernie Sanders during the primaries, and I own the fucking site. My writers are free to disagree as we don't have the same purity tests Uygur has (but claims he doesn't), and we don't publish purposefully misleading bullshit like this. The Banter is not an ideological outlet -- we call out falsities on both the right and the left and more often that not support candidates who don't appeal to assholes. Uygur on the other hand, is the asshole Bernie supporter who made other Bernie supporters like myself wary of him and his politics. This is a nuance Uygur couldn't possibly understand and is the primary reason why his purity politics won't ever work (imagine explaining to Uygur that Bernie Sanders could become the next president, but only if he'd shut the fuck up about him!).

I'm always amazed people take Uygur seriously. From continuing to deny historical facts like the Armenian genocide (Cenk says he doesn't know enough about the well documented episode to comment on it) to his absurdly obvious two faced lying about Sam Harris, Uygur has as much intellectual credibility as Sean Hannity. Uygur may be more sophisticated than the Fox News blowhard, but his shameless dishonesty is no less glaring.

Given his business has been built mining Youtube viewers (80 million of them!), this is really not all that surprising. I'm hoping Uygur doesn't go after us again, not because I have any interest in what he has to say, but because I'll have to watch his show again.